Difference Between Mali-400MP GPU and Tegra 2

Mali-400 MP is a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) developed by ARM in 2008. Mali-400 MP supports a wide range of use from mobile user interfaces to smartbooks, HDTV and mobile gaming. Tegra 2 is a System-on-Chip developed by Nvidia for mobile devices such as smart phones, personal digital assistants, and mobile Internet devices. Nvidia claims that Tegra™ 2 is the first mobile dual-core CPU and therefore it has extreme multitasking capabilities.

Mali™-400 MP

Mali™-400 MP is the world’s first OpenGL ES 2.0 conformant multi-core GPU. It provides support for vector graphics through OpenVG 1.1 and 3D graphics through OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, thus provides a complete graphics acceleration platform based on open standards. Mali-400 MP is scalable from 1 to 4 cores. It also provides the AMBA® AXI interface industry standard, which makes the integration of Mali-400 MP into SoC designs straight-forward. This also provides a well-defined interface for connecting Mali-400 MP to other bus architectures. Further, Mali-400 MP has a fully programmable architecture that provides high performance support for both shader-based and fixed-function graphics APIs. Mali-400 MP has a single driver stack for all multi-core configurations, which simplifies application porting, system integration and maintenance. Features provided by Mali-400 MP includes advanced tile-based deferred rendering and local buffering of intermediate pixel states that reduces memory bandwidth overhead and power consumption, efficient alpha blending of multiple layers in hardware and Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) using rotated grid multi sampling that improves the graphics quality and performance.

Nvidia Tegra™ 2

According to Nvidia, Tegra™ 2 is the first mobile dual-core CPU that has extreme multitasking capabilities. Due to this, they claim that it can provide two times faster browsing, hardware accelerated Flash and console-quality gaming with the NVIDIA® GeForce® GPU. Key features in Tegra™ 2 are Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU that is the first mobile CPU with out-of-order execution. This provides faster web browsing, very fast response time and overall better performance. Another key feature is the Ultra-low power (ULP) GeForce GPU, which provides outstanding mobile 3D game playability and a visually engaging, highly-responsive 3D user interface with very low power consumption. Tegra™ 2 also contains 1080p Video Playback Processor that allows watching 1080p HD movies stored on a mobile device on a HDTV without compromising battery life.

Difference between Mali-400MP GPU and Tegra 2

Main difference between Mali™-400 MP and Tegra™ 2 is the fact that Mali™-400 MP is a GPU while Tegra™ 2 is a mobile CPU that contains NVIDIA® GeForce® GPU. There had been some benchmark comparisons done by Anandtech, between Tegra™ 2 and Exynos 4210 that features the Mali-400 MP GPU. Exynos 4210 is a SoC based on the 32-bit RISC processor designed for smart phones, tablet PCs and Netbook markets. These benchmarks include SunSpider Javascript benchmark 0.9, GUIMark2 – mobile vector charting test for flash performance and GLBenchmark 2.0 – pro. These benchmark tests shows that Tegra 2 takes the lead over Exynos in almost every category. Specially, this is especially true for mobile gaming.

Wrong, Mali400 beats Tegra 2 in almost all the tests. This comparison needs to be updated considering it was published before the Mali400 was even released in the SGSII so whatever benchmarks they was relying for this “review” was pre production model devices with crappy pre production drivers.